‘Kriegskind (War Child); Eine Judische Kindheit in Hamburg (A Jewish Childhood in Hamburg)’ by Marione Ingram

Once a year the Hamburg Jewish Association sends me a beautiful wall calendar with pictures of the city. As my late father, his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents lived and worked there for many years, I am somehow also entitled to receive this annual token of my family’s association with the city. In addition, the Association attaches a report of its activities in the preceding year, together with a list of books which are connected in some way with the city. This book drew my attention, and after I had submitted my request it duly arrived by post and provided me with fascinating reading-matter during the Coronavirus lockdown. I must admit that my German vocabulary is sadly lacking, so that I found myself having to look up many words in the dictionary, but I feel that the effort was well worth it.

Marione Ingram was born in Hamburg in 1938 to a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father, and so was defined as a ‘mischling’ (half-breed) by the Nazi authorities. Her autobiographical book begins with her account of having been sent by her mother when she was eight years old to take her younger sister to their aunt. She decided to return unbidden and found her mother in the throes of an attempt to commit suicide by putting her head in their gas oven.

That is as dramatic a start to any book as any you will find, and I read with bated breath how this child managed somehow to rescue and revive her mother. From that moment on there is a special bond between mother and daughter, and it is this that saves them from the subsequent massive bombing of Hamburg by the Allies and the firestorm that ensued. Marione describes the devastation caused by the American bombers and ‘Flying Fortresses’ by day and the British ‘Mosquitos’ by night in the framework of the concerted Allied attack known by the codename Gomorrha. She describes the frequent air-raid warnings and all-clear signals, and provides a telling account of the way their neighbours refused to allow her and her mother to enter the air-raid shelter, stating that it was reserved for ‘Aryans.’

In the total devastation that followed, Marion and her mother wandered through entire neighbourhoods of burning and destroyed buildings, trying to avoid the corpses that lay on all sides, eventually finding refuge by immersing themselves in a canal. It later transpired that all the people in the air-raid shelter that declined to accept them had perished in the bombardment. It so happened that the events of Gomorrha served to save Marione’s and her family (her father had been conscripted into the Luftwaffe) from being deported to a concentration camp, but they knew they had to go into hiding. This was arranged by their father, and they were given refuge in the flimsy farmyard hut belonging to an acquaintance.

Marione, her sister and her mother spent two years in hiding in the hut, subsisting on very little food, forced to help the farmer in various tasks and constantly hoping to avoid capture. When they were finally informed that Hitler was dead and the war was over, they were able to emerge from their hiding-place and return to what was left of the city. Marione began to attend a school in the Blankenese suburb of Hamburg which had been established on the estate of the Warburg banking family to provide shelter for Jewish children who had survived the camps.

At the school Marione met and befriended Uri, and she devotes one of the last chapters in her book to his harrowing story, describing how his parents and siblings were murdered in Auschwitz, and how he saved himself while still a teenager by accepting any kind of labour in the camp. He was eventually sent as a slave labourer to Alfred Krupps’s vast industrial complex in the town of Essen. The account of the awful conditions under which the slave-labourers, who had been brought from every country occupied by the Germans, lived and worked, and the sadistic and brutal treatment by the members of the S.S. who oversaw the work, is particularly vivid and distressing. Although the conditions and treatment were atrocious for everyone, especially bad conditions and treatment were reserved for the Jewish women prisoners there.

As the Allies advanced and the Germans realised that they would not be victorious, they moved large numbers of the prisoners to death camps, in order to erase evidence of their crimes. Uri managed to survive, but for a long time was too traumatized to speak about his experiences, until Marione managed to gain his confidence and hear his story, which she recounts in her book.

Many of the children at the school in Blankenese, including Uri, eventually went to live in what later became Israel, but Marione decided to go to America, and has made a life for herself there, taking an active part in anti-racist activities. Her efforts many years later, at a reunion of those who had attended the school, to find out what had become of Uri were fruitless, but she writes of the positive relations between the seventy or so people who attended the reunion, whom she now regards as her new family.

The book made a deep impression on me, and constitutes important documentation of a momentous period in modern history. I’m glad I made the effort to read it in German. I imagine that writing it cannot have been an easy task for the author, but I’m also glad to know that it has been published in English under the title ‘The Hands of War.’

Hanging Out with Hubby

 

In Israel we are just beginning to feel the easing of the strict lockdown rules. At the recent very low-key Independence Day celebrations one of the individuals honoured with lighting one of the twelve flames which traditionally mark the opening of the day’s events declared how much she missed being able to see, hug and kiss her grandchildren. That must have triggered something in the national psyche, as not long afterwards the Prime Minister announced – as part of the easing of restrictions – that grandchildren will henceforth be able to visit their grandparents, though still keeping a safe distance. I doubt that any other national leader has included that particular facet of family life in their official announcements about relaxing coronavirus restrictions. Well done, popular entertainer Tzippi Shavit!

But in the interim, most of the population has had to tread a long and lonely road, staying as far away as possible from normal human contact. In other words, couples have been suddenly thrown back into one another’s company, after having become accustomed to a life of activity, whether together or individually, and the freedom to come and go more or less as and when they chose.

In my own case, blessed with a considerate mate and a spacious house, this has not proved to be a hardship. But this has not been the case for everyone. Families with small children in cramped flats have experienced great difficulties, and I don’t envy anyone in that situation.

Single people have also had to come to grips with even greater isolation – and loneliness – than before. This was brought home to me in a recent Zoom meeting of the group of Jerusalem residents who meet once a fortnight to converse in German, under the auspices of the association of former residents of Central Europe.

The fact that most of these – mainly retired – individuals could even contemplate a Zoom meeting is no small achievement in itself. It’s a sign of modern times that by now most people can cope with this aspect of technology. The meeting was initiated by one of the members (one of the few men), but only after over a month of lockdown. By contrast, the German language class I attend here in Mevasseret Zion started Zoom meetings almost as soon as the lockdown began – largely due to our energetic young teacher, who will stop at nothing to continue teaching her mature pupils.

In the Zoom meeting of the Jerusalem group each participant gave a brief account of how they had been spending the previous weeks. To my surprise, almost everyone had found the period positive, on the individual level and as a couple, finding that they enjoyed one another’s company and benefited from having time to relax, read, write, garden, listen to music or watch TV and films together. Only one woman who lives on her own complained that she found the period difficult and longed to resume attending concerts, lectures and other cultural events. I also miss concerts, but there’s no shortage of music on the radio, YouTube and TV.

This is no scientific study, but it seems only natural that people who have lived alongside one another for many years will have settled into some kind of modus vivendi, continuing to live in harmony, and even if circumstances change will manage somehow to adapt and benefit.

On a personal level, this quiet period has enabled me to concentrate on my various writing projects, and so I have managed to publish another novel (‘Friends, Neighbours, Traitors’) on Amazon. Hubby has been similarly engaged and has completed another learned article about the painter Caravaggio. Since his background is in the exact sciences it amazes me that he has made this switch to art history, becoming something of an expert in this field. We’ve even got used to being without any offspring for Friday night dinner. And of course, the garden got some attention too.

Provided we remain in reasonably good health, we will probably be able one day to look back at this period and see that it had benefits as well as drawbacks.

 

‘The Story of English; How the English Language Conquered the World’ by Philip Gooden

 

Having worked for most of my life as a translator, editor and writer, I thought it must be about time I learned something about the English language, which is the principal tool of my work.

I studied English at school, mainly literature with a little grammar along the way, but decided that I did not want to continue with it at university, so switched to Sociology, which turned out to be fascinating. And of course I had to use English in order to read and communicate, writing essays and gaining new insights into the way societies function.

The author of this book takes the reader through the various periods of British – and American – history, describing who conquered whom and when, and the effect this had on the growth and development of the English language. He starts with the Biblical legend of the Tower of Babel and posits the idea that there may indeed once have been a universal language, now lost in the mists of time, but paralleling the tale that once upon a time all people could speak the same language and understand one another. In fact, in the eighteenth century, William Jones, a linguist and scholar, posited the theory that present-day Asian and European languages had a common root, after he discovered links between the ancient Indian tongue of Sanskrit and Greek and Latin (the last two having clear links to most European languages).

Gooden takes us through the various stages of ancient British history, starting with the Celts, who lived in the British Isles from the Bronze Age onwards. Their language is akin to the languages spoken in Ireland, Scotland and Brittany. The Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, whose languages were mainly Germanic, were sea-faring marauders who settled in northern and eastern parts of Britain, and influenced the language(s) spoken by the local populace. It has been suggested that the term ‘Viking’ is an ancient Celtic word for ‘pirate.’

The Romans, under Julius Caesar and Claudius, conquered Britain from around 410 C.E., and remained there for some six hundred years, until the collapse of the Roman empire. Their language, Latin, was probably spoken by those segments of the British population with whom they had contact, but it was only after the Norman conquest, led by William the Conqueror, that the Latin-influenced French language came to be the dominant tongue spoken throughout the British islaes. It has even been suggested that Richard the Lionheart, the son of Henry II and Elinor of Aquitaine, spoke French and not English, as French remained the language of the ruling class for many generations. To this day the terms used for cooked food in England are closer to their French equivalents than the words used for the animals (sheep = mutton [mouton]; cow = beef [boeuf]), etc.

Thus, the English language which evolved in the early Middle Ages was a fusion of Norman French and Old English. At the time of the Renaissance in Europe, English became the language of literature, with writers such as Shakespeare and many others. King James, who succeeded Queen Elizabeth the First, instituted the translation of the Bible by teams of scholars. This gave us the rich and mellifluous text which is treasured throughout the English-speaking world to this day.

In the time of Queen Victoria the British Empire ruled about a third of the globe, and this served to disseminate the English language to such a wide extent that to this day English is the official language of countries which have a wide variety of native languages.

With the colonization of North America principally by English speakers, the language gained precedence over the various other languages spoken by successive waves of immigrants. Thus, with the growing pre-eminence of American power and prestige, as well as the widespread use of English in scientific and academic circles (not to mention the internet and social media), English has become the international lingua franca.

It is impossible to summarise this informative and well-researched book in this short space, as Philip Gooden gives detailed analyses of the processes and individuals who influenced the development of English throughout its history. For anyone who wants to learn more about the subject, I highly recommend this well-written and accessible book.

Up and Running

 

Yes, it’s here at last! My latest book (my seventh), ‘Friends, Neighbors, Traitors,’ is now available as an ebook for a mere $2.99 on Amazon. If you find the price a bit too steep for you, you can always wait for 10^th May, when it can be downloaded for free. I am currently in the process of preparing the paperback version of the book, which I hope will also be available on Amazon very soon.

The story is set in a Jerusalem neighborhood in 1983. Israeli troops are mired in fighting in Lebanon in an attempt to uproot terrorist groups there. Although Jerusalem is not affected directly by the combat, one of the consequences of the situation is a fall in tourism, with consequent damage to the economy.

The book has four main protagonists, three women and one man. Helena, who is a stay-at-home mother, is bringing up her two young sons, together with her husband, Aaron. Originally from England, Helena finds herself constantly struggling to cope with the realities of daily life in Israel, and the demands of her husband and children.

Helena’s friend, Anna, an artist who hails from Denmark, is battling to remain solvent as she tries to care for Shira, her five-year-old daughter. Anna is divorced, but her ex-husband uses every opportunity to insult and abuse her whenever he comes to take Shira for her weekly visit. In addition, he has been trying to gain custody of Shira through the courts, causing Anna constant anguish and fear. Anna and Helena are friends, but Anna is secretly having an affair with Helena’s husband, Aaron.

Naomi was born in Germany before the war, and came to Israel as a child with her parents. She lives on her own, works as a translator, and is doing her best to come to terms with the dense philosophical tract she has undertaken to translate. She suffers from bouts of depression associated with her grief over the death of her mother. She and Helena meet by chance and strike up a friendship. Helena introduces Naomi to Anna, and they soon become fast friends too

The changing light and atmosphere of the city of Jerusalem also play a role in the development of events, some of them trivial, others dramatic. Essentially, the book is about life as a woman and an outsider, the difficulty of coping with the realities of daily existence, and the demands society puts on us to carry on with some semblance of normalcy. This applies both to parents bringing up young children, and (or perhaps even especially) to someone who is childless. The narrative switches between the three main protagonists as they find their attachment to reality threatened, doing what they can to deal with it.

The book ends with Aaron, who is surprised to find that matters are not going quite the way he thought they would.

Here’s the link to ‘Friends, Neighbors, Traitors’: https://www.amazon.com/Friends-Neighbors-Traitors-Dorothea-Shefer-Vanson-ebook/dp/B087G5NMGY

Buy or download my book, and I will be very grateful to you. If you can bring yourself to write a review of it you will be doing a good deed and giving a struggling writer a helping hand.